Making the connections between strategy, corporateness and HRM

In the opening chapter we introduced two of the most important corporate-level concepts in our model branding and reputation management and showed how these are important to the key strategic interests of organizations and nations in market economies. Reputations and brands provide essential information to consumers and other stakeholders in an imperfect world. Our second message was that brands and reputations, though validated on the outside by consumers and other external stake-holders, are usually driven from the inside by the quality and actions of employees. In this chapter we wish to develop this last message by shedding some light on the meaning of brands, branding and reputations, especially for non-specialists in these fields, and discuss how they may be related to each other.

However, since all ideas in business and management are something of a contested terrain, there are different schools of thought on branding and reputation management, so we also discuss and evaluate some of these. This is of great practical importance because of confusion over what is meant by branding and reputations. Thus we need to be clear about what we mean, how these ideas might be related to each other and what their specific connections are with people and HRM. To do this, it is first necessary to trace their intellectual justifications and links to the literature and practice of strategic management, which deals with the highest level and most long-term decisions of organizations.